Actress returns to Bourne cast
Julia Stiles tells how she’s given her adult life to Jason Bourne – and why men stop her in the street.
At the beginning of Jason Bourne, her fourth film in the blockbuster action franchise, Julia Stiles appears in near-total darkness.
‘‘Christian Dassault sent me,’’ she says in a voice so low she could be a man or a woman.
That password admits her to a hackers’ headquarters in Iceland.
Within minutes, she has broken into the CIA’s mainframe and stolen top secret files, unleashing the action for the rest of the film.
In the nine years since Stiles and Matt Damon last joined forces for a Bourne movie, both their characters have been living ‘‘off the grid’’.
The change in Nicky Parsons, who began in 2002 as the neat CIA analyst Nicolette and appears in Paul Greengrass’s new film under the hacker codename Knightrider, is dramatic.
Not only has she gone rogue – smart, wild and threatening – but, under cover of a riot in Greece, she lures Bourne out from hiding, in the film’s single most impressive sequence.
‘‘It seems a little bit exploitative for me to say this, but I get chills when I think about the scenes that I was in,’’ she says when we meet, early on the day of the UK premiere.
‘‘Paul Greengrass has a knack for setting an action movie in a world that is very familiar to us. He can keep the political issues and the environment very timely and relevant.
He wrote it a year ago. But it feels shockingly familiar given all the protests and violence that we’ve experienced in the United States.’’
Stiles first read the script of the 2002 film The Bourne Identity – or at least, the parts she was allowed to see –when she was in her dorm room at Columbia University.
She was 19, and already enough of a teenage star that going to college was in itself an unusual move.
‘‘I remember thinking: Doug Liman was a really interesting director. At that time he was more of an indie darling,’’ she says now. ‘‘And I thought it was really intriguing that Matt was going to play this action hero, because at that time he wasn’t an obvious choice’’.
In the first edit, her character died – ‘‘she was thrown up against a wall and her neck was snapped’’, Stiles recalls – but the film was recut to make way for a possible sequel with her in it. As a result, she has lived with Bourne, as she puts it, ‘‘my entire adult life’’.
By the time that script arrived, Stiles had already starred in the magnificently tart teen rendering of The Taming of the Shrew, 10 Things I Hate About You, alongside the young Heath Ledger; she’d been Ophelia to Ethan Hawke’s modern-day Hamlet in Michael Almereyda’s urban indie film; she’d been cast in State and Main by David Mamet, whose play Oleanna she’d go on to perform on stage in New York and London; and she’d played the lead in Save the Last Dance, an inter-racial teen love story which was released to distracting levels of success while she was in her first year at Columbia.
This was not long after she’d been deemed by Neil Jordan to be ‘‘too old’’ for the part in Interview with the Vampire that eventually went to a squeaky Kirsten Dunst.
Dunst is just one year Stiles’s junior; the truth is, though, Stiles would always have been too old for a part like that.
She brings to everything she’s done a quality of seriousness that is rare in real life and even rarer in Hollywood.
‘‘I remember finding that character very refreshing,’’ Stiles says now of Kat in 10 Things I Hate About You, ‘‘because she was so angst-ridden.
Or just brassy and more fierce than any other example of a teenage girl that I had seen’’.
Wonderful though that film is, contemptuous teenagers are arguably more familiar fare than adult women with equal levels of severity.
So Stiles’s exceptional nature has become more emphatic the longer she goes on, and the fewer prisoners she takes.
In the Bourne films, she signals a kind of intelligence that genre films don’t usually require of their female characters.
A Bond movie wouldn’t know what to do with a Stiles in its script. Alicia Vikander, the ostensible heroine of the latest Bourne incarnation, struggles to achieve CIA steeliness, but Stiles is all determination and ticking thought from the moment of her arrival. In person, she’s equally austere.
Once rumoured to have dumped a boyfriend because he didn’t like the novels of John Steinbeck,
Stiles admits now that she’s often stopped in the street by men telling her to smile. When we meet, her replies to my questions are considered, friendly and even unguarded – she volunteers the information that she’s just got engaged and is looking forward to ‘‘nesting’’ with her fiancee, the cameraman Preston J Cook – yet her face is so still and her gaze so direct it’s disarming. You’d call her expression deadpan if she were joking, but she’s not.
I ask Stiles if she thinks people are afraid of seriousness in women, and she cites the Bechdel Test, a theory devised by the graphic novelist Alison Bechdel.
‘‘She developed this idea that there’s a litmus test for movies,’’ Stiles explains. ‘‘There’ve got to be two main female roles, and they have to have a conversation together, that’s not about men. I can’t think of an example of a movie that passes that test.’’ Jason Bourne (M) opens in New Zealand cinemas on Thursday.